Field of the Invention
The present invention relates to a manufacturing facility.
The present invention further relates to a method of manufacturing.
Related Art
Roll to roll processing has proven to be a very effective way of manufacturing foil based products. Examples of such products are opto-electrical products, such as (O)Leds, displays, electrochrome devices and photovoltaic devices. Other examples of such products are batteries, organic circuitry etc. Such roll to roll processing typically involves the deposition of various, possibly patterned, functional layers and processing those layers, for example for curing or drying. It is desirable that the manufacturing facility can be easily configured to enable manufacturing of different products or different variations of a product. It is also desirable that the requirements for clean room facilities are modest. In order to facilitate rapid development of new products, it is also desirable that easy up-scaling of a production line is possible by adding elements when needed and without the need of a rearrangement of the already existing configuration of the production line. At last, for more advanced products (e.g. for 2nd and 3th generation of products), it is desirable that extra deposition and processing steps can be easily added to the configuration.
It is noted that WO 2005/116552 discloses an apparatus for coating a support film with a pharmaceutical agent, in particular, for the production of plasters with transdermal action. The apparatus comprises an unwinding station for the support film, an application station for the application of liquid or pasty pharmaceutical agent to the support film, a drying station for drying the applied agent on the support film and a winding station for the coated support film. The device comprises an application module and at least one drying module arranged adjacently, whereby the application module contains the unwinding station, the application station and the winding station, whilst a drying module or several drying modules in line form the drying station.